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I live in the suburbs near Vancouver Canada, I dont know if my
problem applies to your city, or if my solution would work in your
city, So I hope you will judge my idea mainly as a a way of fixing
tranist in the vancouver suburbs.
Our cities main development came at a time when cars were
affordable,
so public transit was never a major focus. Our
transportation system stayed small, and because its
small, everybody continues to use cars now, even though we have
a city population of one million, and could really use some good
public trans.
The biggest problem with our cities public transit is that if
you want to travel to a place more than a few miles away, you
usually need at least 3 connector busses, each coming every 30 or
so minutes, this and each coming at odd times, often promising a
2 minute wait between busses. The problem begins when one bus
is a few minutes behind, you may miss your next connector and
are now an hour late to your destination! Obviously for anyone
holding a job or wanting to schedule there lifes, at all,our public
transit is fairly unreliable--hitting a few red lights or having a
few inquisitive boarders may mean that one misses there
connector bus and are now an hour late for work.
My solution would be to have wifi hotspots near the main
terminals or every 10th stop that could comunicate with other
busses in the area and see if they are running on time, or behind.
If busses the other connector busses are behind the driver of the
fastest bus would be given orders to slow down and let the
connector busses catch up, that way no commuters would be left
behind.
Also perhaps in a couple of years maybe the busses could just
connect to ad hoc networks while moving, which would make for
a more seamless process.
I rambled a bit more than usual so here is a sum up:
If all busses in suburban areas communicate with each other there
locations, and all busses adjusted there speeds so that their
pickup/drop offs were in sync, people would never have 1-2 hour
bus waits because there connector bus left early.
[link]
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So you'd slow down the entire network because one bus is falling behind? |
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It would probably make more sense to add buses during morning and evening commutes. It would probably make even more sense to add express buses to/from the most heavily traveled stops. |
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So long as every bus driver kept in mind that they had to
intercept with the other bus driver the fast bus need not
slow down much. It may end up that the slower bus
realises that it must pick up the pace. |
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Also personally, I would prefer the idea of having a bus
travel slowed down by a minute or two rather than
missing my bus ever other day. |
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Toronto: I think we do that here (we're ahead of Vancouver? how-the-hell did that happen?) or at least the buses have radios and GPS so we *could*... our buses even call out the stops using GPS which I think is pretty cool (and useless for me since I know my way around, but still cool.) |
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Look I know if you looked at this idea as a suggestion to
make busses wait, it woulf beabout as popular as death or
taxes, so dont look at it that way. |
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Like i said, in some suburban areas with long trips. you
may all of your connectors about 80% of the time. meaning
your an hour late one day a week. |
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If my idea were implimentet, you would get would have
regular trips 80% of the time and on the odd day your trip
was 3 minutes longer. Seems like a good trade off to me. |
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Look I know if you looked at this idea as a suggestion to
make busses wait, it woulf beabout as popular as death or
taxes, so dont look at it that way. |
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Like i said, in some suburban areas with long trips. you
may all of your connectors about 80% of the time. meaning
your an hour late one day a week. |
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If my idea were implimentet, you would get would have
regular trips 80% of the time and on the odd day your trip
was 3 minutes longer. Seems like a good trade off to me. |
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Look I know if you looked at this idea as a suggestion to
make busses wait, it woulf beabout as popular as death or
taxes, so dont look at it that way. |
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Like i said, in some suburban areas with long trips. you
may all of your connectors about 80% of the time. meaning
your an hour late one day a week. |
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If my idea were impliment, you would get would have
regular trips 80% of the time and on the odd day your trip
was 3 minutes longer. Seems like a good trade off to me. |
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[+] for anything to make public transport more intelligent. I've seen a handi-matic version of this in a rural area where one bus driver calls another to ask him if he is on time / has any passengers to transfer, and waits if needs be. |
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More sensible planning may also help - replace those 2 minute changes with 5 minutes and you should almost always make it. You slow down a bit, but the rest of the network doesn't suffer. Alternatively, make 'hubs' connected by very regular bus services to each other, and less regular local services. Then if the local service is running late it doesn't matter, a mainline service will be along in a few minutes. |
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One thing that makes synchronized transit impossible is that there is no way of controlling the other cars on the road. One thing that happens in my local transit system is that if the bus driver knows that he is running behind, he will ask if anyone is connecting to another bus. If they are, he will radio ahead to dispatch that he has connecting passengers. If the bus cannot wait they have another on standby that they can ride until they catch up with the bus that they missed. |
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Madness has made a good suggestion. Increasing the "layover" time between connections on the outlying feeder routes would likely solve the problem. It might mean you have to leave ten minutes earlier than you do now, but it should eliminate, or at the very least minimize the likelihood of being late. What you should be doing is getting the word out to as many folks as possible. |
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Don't just whinge at the bus drivers. All they hear all day long is complaints. Any time you find yourself at a transit hub locate a transit supervisor and let them know the problem exists. Don't just complain, give them suggestions for a solution. |
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Translink needs to know as well, so I suggest you call them, email them, and send them letters. Tell your fellow riders how to complain and who to complain to. Get Mike MCardell to take a morning commute with you. Heck, go down to the Art Gallery steps, recruit some of those professional protesters that hang out there and stage a rally! It's the West Coast Way! |
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FlyingToaster, our transit vehicles also call out the stops, but in some cases I wonder if they use GPS. The other day I was riding to downtown Vancouver and as the bus was approaching the last stop before crossing the Lions Gate Bridge it identified the stop as being the following one, 4 kilometers away. |
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[Canuck] bingo, that was when I asked the driver, too. |
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London seems to have done a *fairly* good job on this problem just by throwing more buses at it (financed by the Congestion Charge); given enough buses, there are no 30-minute waits, so the problem goes away. |
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If you catch the earlier bus you'd be an hour early or on time, depending how things go. Seems like the logical thing to do. |
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